Crushed by Behemoths: DISROTTED / IRN Split Review – Stream – Footage

HEAVY doesn’t even begin to describe this goddamned thing. Conceived in torment and then begotten straight into death, this brand new DISROTTED / IRN split is one of those beings that will never know light. This is music that comes from the grave and which has been birthed straight into oblivion without ever knowing hope. Irn and Disrotted are two of the most extreme, crushing, and far out there doom bands in existence today, and this pairing of tracks put together by the two bands has created an abominable split packed with complete downtuned crush depth and tyrannical-like sludge-doom extremism.

With “Plagued by the Weird,” Disrotted kicks things off straight from the gut of the underworld, with an ominous and sinister drone that starts swelling and building at sloth speed, locking the listener’s mind into a nightmarish stasis. The tempos are so absurdly slow and dilated that the listener literally loses perception of its state and surroundings, as if some kind of reverberating hypnosis has taken control of their senses and perception and is trying to drag them to complete madness. The riffs are so behemoth-like that it almost sounds as if the band’s music is slowly erecting massive walls of swelling static that englobe everything like a devouring fortress, and the sustain is so massive, prolonged, and endlessly crushing that the mind struggles to even navigate itself out of it. Overall, a crushing and fine example of boundless and extreme as fuck doom.

IRN, on the other hand, fill the B side of the split with a blackened slab of sonic slime called “Swamp Burial,” a more dynamic, unpredictable, and vicious form of sludge-doom, yet equally suffocating in its slow-motion insanity – something that sounds vaguely more rooted in punk and avantgarde, and more sprawling in its intents, structure, moods and tone. This songs is long as fuck as well, starting with a humongous barrage of slow-motion torture made of crippling blackened doom riffs that bring to mind bands like Indian and Lord Mantis, before losing itself in a weird and ominous series of scattered drum patterns and abstract noise ambiance. Soon this ambience starts to coalesce into a collapsing black hole of bleak as fuck drones from which harrowing screams shoot out – a scary as fuck approach to the craft, which reminded me a bit of the more experimental doom as seen in bands like Gnaw and Khanate for example. Seventeen minutes later, your mind is reduced to ashes by the mind boggling sonic bashing IRN just delivered through the torturous spires of this bastard doom behemoth.